3.11: Progress – 2

The soldiers guarding the building stepped aside as they saw us coming. Fists thumped against their chest in salute.

I returned the gesture before pulling the large doors open.

Air smelling of metal and oil drifted out.

Inside, large crates that I knew held ingots of copper, tin, zinc and lead lined the walls.

The doors leading to the inner room swung open.

Four men stepped out, groaning as they dragged a wagon with two large wheels behind them.

On it sat the new defender of our nation.

A large, thick and shiny tube of bronze.

As long as a man and around 25 cm thick at the base, it possessed the most enticing curves in the world.

Behind the wagon shambled the wide-set blacksmith turned machinist, his blood-shot eyes surrounded by dark circles and beard an unruly mess.

When our eyes met, pride shone through exhaustion. “Your tubes are ready, milord,” Kovar said, swaying on the spot.

“How have you been, Kovar?” I asked before I could stop myself.

“Not well, but we got the job done, even after you forgot to mention that not only the caster had to be perfectly machined and balanced, but so did every pulley and roller involved. We almost had an accident.”

Bitterness dripped off his every word. No one ever accused the man of being diplomatic.

“Oh.”

I resisted the urge to make an excuse. I had no experience with machining beyond a single semester of messing around in college, but it would be poor solace if someone had died as a result of my forgetfulness.

“Was anyone hurt?”

“No. We just kept bumbling forward for months until we figured it out ourselves.” He slapped the cannon. “This is the result.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “Thank you, Kovar. I will make it up to you.”

He nodded, his shoulder relaxing, as if an invisible weight had been lifted from them. “The other one is ready too.”

“Really?” I didn’t know what to say. I had pushed the poor man to the brink of exhaustion, but I couldn’t say I regretted it.

“I kept trying to weld the entire tube for weeks and failing, until I finally used your coke to heat it. Works much better than charcoal, as you said, but did I really have to make it by hand? Why not just cast it like this one?” he said, pointing to the shiny bronze tube.

The newcomers were looking at it with mild fascination, not understanding how world-changing it was.

I shook my head. “No. The caster would have to spin much faster to make tubes of such small diameter. We don’t have the time to perfect a new design.”

“Well, I have one there, if you want to see it,” he said, pointing indoors, while he glanced towards the newcomers.

“You’ll be seeing them often. They’ll be working closely with us.”

“They’re not Cha,” he said, his light brown eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“No, but Chadom needs them.”

He held his tongue.

While Aprilia introduced the men to Kovar, I took a look at the bronze tube.

I enhanced my eyesight and the world sharpened.

Its inside was almost perfectly circular and straight. There were some clear cutting marks throughout.

“You managed to build the boring machine?” I asked.

“Aramid did.”

“Good work.”

“Boring?” Aprilia asked.

“They have to be very precise from the inside,” I said, curling my hand. “After casting or drilling, they have to be bored and reamed.”

Our new members looked mortified, while Aprilia’s cheeks were turning pink.

“What?” I asked.

Kovar’s eyes pointed to my hand, whose finger was going in-and-out of the tube of my other hand.

“Grow up.”

While they talked among each other, I went to the room that housed the lathe by myself. An iron shaft connected to the waterwheel spun overhead.

The wooden walls were lined with shelves that held vices, clamps, wrenches, taps, dies, files, drawplates and drill bits. At the center lay our masterpiece; the lathe. Crude yet accurate and powerful enough to make brass and bronze components. Iron too, if one had the patience.

A proper workshop that would birth the future of Chadom.

My eyes went to the ingots of bronze laying in the corner and what stood next to them.

A long, octagonal tube of iron.

I picked up the barrel and pointed it toward the open doors. A patch of sky became visible. The tube’s inside was perfectly circular and straight.

All that was left was to make a breech and some ammo.

Soon we would have the power to kill men by the dozens.

A terrible thing, which would turn this valley into a safe haven.

I looked at Kovar. Hunched and barely standing despite his youth. I doubted drilling a long iron rod would be an easy task with our limited knowledge of metallurgy, and I didn’t want to wait for months it would take for us to figure it out, so I had opted for a tried and tested method; rolling a flat sheet of iron and forge welding it into a tube. The poor blacksmith had pushed himself to accomplish it in time.

I went to the large doors to the right and entered a large room. A much bigger version of the lathe covered most of the floor, on which the cannon must have been bored. At the opposite side of the wall lay a long table. An apprentice was turning the large handle at one end that spun the long boring rod, while Aramid slowly moved the gun barrel forward, pushing the rod deeper into it.

A faint crack echoed in the massive workshop.

“Stop. The bit broke,” Aramid mumbled in a tired voice.

“It’s the third time,” the apprentice said, swiping sweat from his brow. “Are the blacksmiths skimping on their work?”

“No,” I spoke up. “You’re cutting iron with iron. It’s bound to happen.”

It’s what happened when you didn’t have advanced alloys.

The apprentice jolted awake. Poor Aramid didn’t have the energy to do even that.

“Milord, we’re glad that you’re well after the last night’s scare,” he said, turning to me. He looked just as tired as Kovar.

“Thanks. Sorry about pushing you so hard,” I said, approaching the shorter man.

“Anything for you. It will help Chadom, right?” he asked in a much more relaxed tone that his usual voice. All the hard work had squeezed the meekness out of him.

“Yes. It will. I’ll give you a demonstration later.”

Leaving the men to their task, I went back to my companions.

The Ducklings had arrived, eyes shining with eagerness.

“Master! We’re so glad you’re safe!” The well-built Fennar said out loud.

“Thank you. I can see you’re very eager to show me your work.”

The fifteen and sixteen year-olds nodded together.

“Come on, then.”

They led us to a building that had been erected nearby.

Tools, nails and pieces of wood lay on the ground and shelves alike.

It was disordered beyond even my tolerance, but I wasn’t in the mood to scold them, as my eyes remained glued to the machine at the center of the room.

A proper loom.

By the looks of it, it had been in use for some time.

“Did you try the thread I sent you?” I asked.

“We used up all of it,” Tobin said, smiling broadly. His chubby cheeks accentuated it further. “Frida is very good at it.”

The tall girl blushed.

“All of it?”

“Yes.”

As I jogged my memory, I felt the urge to smack my head.

“Jack?” Aprilia asked.

“I… made a mistake.”

“What kind of mistake?”

“I should have told them to build a spinning jenny first.”

“Jenny?”

I nodded. The spinning jenny was one of the first innovations of the industrial revolution, which solved the massive problem of the thread becoming a major bottleneck once the flying shuttle was invented. Spinning threads used to be such a laborious and time consuming task that it took at least three spinners to produce enough thread to supply just one weaver. The Jenny made it possible for one spinner to supply a weaver entirely by herself at first, then multiple weavers.

But no, I had to chase after the fancy Jacquard loom with its complicated design first.

“You know what?” I said, “We’ll just skip the Jenny and go straight to the water frame.”

We had a lathe now. We could make accurate gears, so we should be able to make the machine, given enough time. I wasn’t in a hurry to produce cloth like I was with gunpowder weapons, so we could afford to be ambitious.

The teenagers’ eyes lit up in anticipation, while the rest looked at me with confusion.

“Anything else you managed to finish?” I asked.

They nodded enthusiastically and pointed to a box sitting on long legs standing at the corner.

Aprilia approached it. “What is it?”

“A winnower.” Aldren explained. “You put the grain into the hopper. Someone turns the handle that turns the fan inside, which blows away the chaff.”

“But you can just winnow by hand?”

“You don’t have to wait for wind and you lose less grain to it.”

“Very nice,” she said in genuine admiration. “Anything else?”

They shook their heads, nervously looking at the newcomers.

“They have joined our nation. You can talk freely in front of them,” I said.

“You only gave us two designs, Master,” the diminutive Runa said sullenly. “If we had more, we would have built them.”

“I didn’t know it would take me months to get back. Aprilia, give them the sketch for the seed drill next.”

She nodded, hiding a snigger.

The teenagers looked in confusion.

I shook my head in exasperation.

Such beauty marred by a filthy mind.

I’d threaten her with some drilling in private, but she would just ask for more.

“Did you come up with these innovations, Sire?” Harald, who had been watching everything with keen eyes without speaking a word asked.

I thought for a while before answering. “In a way.”

“I can understand why the Cha call you Messiah,” he said, nodding. “You must truly be blessed by God.”

Ansel and Rowan nodded in agreement, as if it was the obvious answer.

I tried to not show my discomfort. I didn’t want to take credit for the lifetime of effort of dozens of inventors, but on the other hand, if I said no, the people would attribute it all to God. I definitely didn’t want that either. Without the belief that man could improve his lot in life by the effort of his own mind and hands, there would be no widespread progress.

But the pace of ‘my’ innovations was unrealistic, to put it very mildly. My best solution to explain it was to say I had been blessed with immense intellect by God.

Aprilia sensed my mood. “Jack, they told me that in the future, only half our people would be farmers. Is that really true?” she asked carefully.

I shook myself out of my thoughts. “Well, we need to first make the seed drill, the mould board plow and the mechanical harvester. Then, yes. One man would be able to feed at least one more.”

That would be our hard limit until we could figure out synthetic fertilizers. So, probably never.

“What would the rest do?” she asked, a hint of fear in her voice.

I went to her and slid an arm around her waist.

“We have endless amount of work ahead of us. Housing, roads and so much more.”

“As long as it’s not war,” she mumbled.

“Let’s hope not,” I said, leaning on her.

Oh how wrong I was.